Article Abstract-Lukasik

Sometimes...and by sometimes I mean always...Brown's work really benefits from a reread through. And so I took the time over this break to reread Ormond in order to make a bit better sense of some the examples Lukasik uses within his piece. And without further ado:


Lukasik, Christopher. “The Vanity of Physiognomy: Dissimulation and Discernment in Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond.” Amerikastudien 50.3 (2005): 484-505.

Lukasik’s article seeks to examine, “How might character be discerned in a post-Revolutionary American society epitomized by both the absences of “distinctions” and “rank” and the presence of deceivers like Ormond” (486). Lukasik does this by contrasting similar seduction novels written in the post-Revolutionary War period. Such texts, which Lukasik labels as “didactic seduction novels” include, The Coquette, Female Quixotism, and Charlotte Temple. Lukasik argues that Brown chooses to critique the commonly accepted practice of physiognomy and portraiture as methods of discerning a person’s character. Brown contrasted the aforementioned novels that placed an important value on understanding a person’s character based upon their physical and facial features.

Lukasik uses textual evidence not only from Ormond and the other seduction novels that Brown was in discourse with, but also the essays of Johann Lavater. Lavater wrote influential essays on physiognomy in the same period in which Brown was writing his novels. Lavater’s pieces, aptly named Essays on Physiognomy, were widely read and mostly accepted by contemporary society during this period. According to Lukasik, Lavater’s theories and writings received notice in post-War America due to “the threat of rapid social and political mobility in America, one that was facilitated by dissimulation and the fluid culture of genteel performance” (489). In this burgeoning young country, any man with a notable presence, acting skills, and enough charisma contained the potential to become socially or politically elite. Such a fluid culture, as Lukasik describes, was relatively unprecedented at this time in the world.
Many Americans soon formed the question as to what, exactly, could be used to distinguish people and their character. Since monetary gains began to be harder to distinguish because of a growing middle class, people then looked to Lavater’s work on physical features as being reliable measures of discernment towards people’s status. However, as Lukasik argues, Brown questions the role physiognomy could have in society by introducing a clever actor; Ormond. Ormond and his sister Martinette are both skilled users of disguise and deception, revealing the limits and fallacies of physiognomy as whole.

This article proved very useful to me as Lukasik uses an abundant amount of evidence to show physiognomy does not work in relation to the men in this text. He carefully shows how both Thomas Craig and Ormond were both subjected to physiognomical study but proved to be the opposite of what various characters had deduced. However, by noting how detailed Lukasik was in examining the male characters of this piece, I found an important aspect of the novel that I feel Lukasik missed. That is, physiognomical study of the women within the text. As mentioned before, a man with enough charismatic prowess could rise through the societal and economic ranks. With this thought in mind, it raises two questions: What position in society does that leave women and what does physical discernment factor into the character of a woman during this period? Exploring these two questions will be the focus I take in my paper.